Teppei Kaneuji
Teppei Kaneuji’s current exhibition at ShugoArts begins in an alcove with the multi-media installation Midnight in a Box (2001–10). The work features footage recorded from the after-hours broadcast of the Osaka branch of the national television network (NHK) projected into an industrial-sized, blue plastic basin that has been turned on its side. The footage is a live feed from a fixed camera overlooking one of the city’s elevated highways, which cuts through a shadowy forest of buildings. Over the course of the video’s two hours, the only action comes from the lights of cars and the ticking of the digital time icon on the screen. A figurative mental block that seemingly manifests the kind of idea that comes from not having any ideas, Midnight in a Box is perhaps emblematic of the exhibition as a whole, which, with its title ‘Recent Works: “Post-Something”’, suggests an occlusion or a blank spot waiting to be filled.
All made within the past year, the sculptures, collages and installations in this show resist cohesive understanding. Mounted on the wall nearest the entrance, the large-scale sculptural composition Splash and Flake (Pipeline #3) (2009) comprises branches and wooden handles of different textures and styles held together by colourful plastic tube joints. Covering an area of about two-metres square, the resulting form is both rigid and pliant, flat and articulated, a paroxysm of intersecting planes and axes. Pinned against a nearby wall, The Eternal (Pattern of Wood Grain #1) and The Eternal (Pattern of Wood Grain #2) (both 2010) are sheets of wood-grained wallpaper ringed with images of liquid cut out from cosmetics advertisements. For a moment, the wood grain looks like an architectural feature, as if Kaneuji had peeled back the standard-issue plaster of the white cube to reveal an underlying framework. However, the collaged frames draw attention to the works’ inherent irony: it’s all paper. 
Presented on a transparent Perspex plinth in the centre of the gallery, the half-metre-high Day Tripper (Sculpture of a Photograph of Paint #1) (2010) is a fragile, standing latticework of scores of neon yellow, aquamarine, sky blue, purple, lime, orange, grey and black zigzags and drips. To make the work, Kaneuji squeezed paint onto a table, photographed it, printed the photographs and then cut along the contours of the paint before assembling the resulting pieces together into a unit. The work nestles in the intersections of different properties: solid and liquid, figuration and abstraction, photograph and object. Light catches on the glossy surfaces of the photographic paper, while, frozen within the photos, light plays upon the surfaces of the squeezed paint.
Model of Something (2010) is a series of transparent Perspex cases nested underneath each other, marked with different coloured linear patterns: vertical stripes, horizontal stripes, diagonal stripes, hash marks, squares, diamonds and circles. Some of the cases are square – including the largest, outermost case – while others are shallow or truncated rectangles. This work conjures a house of mirrors in a box, or a poor man’s version of an Anthony McCall light and smoke installation. It makes you consider space and depth of field in a new way, but contains baffling idiosyncrasies. Inside the largest case, there is also a single sheet of Perspex leaning against one of the larger interior cases. On top of the largest case, is a lone, rectangular case perched on one corner. The repeating yet individuated forms test the limits of redundancy. Every time it verges towards predictability, a singularity screws up the whole system.
This show is Kaneuji’s first since joining the gallery, and comes on the heels of last year's successful mini-survey at the Yokohama Museum of Art. In a sense, it is an anti-solo show. Rather than building towards a complete idea, the works take one or two overlapping principles and atomize them, like beads of oil skittering across a griddle. While their slightness and simplicity makes them easy to overlook, their collective inscrutability suggests work that is moving into uncharted territory. This is surely a welcome development for Kaneuji. When even the artist isn’t sure of where he is going, the possibilities are endless.
